


Old Wounds

by battle_cat



Series: Together [58]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, Whump, infanticide mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-08-07 06:11:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7703569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Furiosa and Max, dealing with shit after a scav run gone bad.</p><p>A sequel to Weak Spot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Wounds

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to [Weak Spot](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5988850) and picks up pretty much right where that fic left off. Things will be clearer if you read that fic, but if not the tags will pretty much give you the gist. Tl;dr: Max and Furiosa get captured while scavenging, bad shit happens, they get the upper hand, kill a bunch of dudes and rescue two women.
> 
> Archive warning is for references to an attempted rape that happens during Weak Spot, and several brief, non-graphic Vault flashbacks.

Furiosa drives. Max sleeps.

There’s a purple shadow blooming under his left eye, the swelling from the clotted cut on his brow ridge starting to creep down. His hands are clenched loosely in his lap, knuckles bruised and bloody. 

Her scarf is still wrapped around his knee, a makeshift compression sleeve, the brace strapped over it. He’d resisted her efforts to pull his leathers up or down enough to see what the damage looked like, and she hadn’t pushed him. They are two days’ hard drive away from the Citadel, and there’s little they can do about it on the road.

In the post-battle haze of escaping the city, their injuries hadn’t seemed so bad, doped up as they were with adrenaline and the relief of having avoided much worse. But now every blow is making itself felt. She’s survived much more serious injuries, and this is far from the first hard beating she’s taken, but that doesn’t change the fact that everything _hurts_.

At least two of her ribs on her left side are broken. One of them had had steel-toed boots, and he’d kicked her a lot of times. The Interceptor is right-side driving, which means shifting with her left side and her less-dexterous metal hand. Every gear change is an eye-watering spike in her torso.

She’s broken ribs before, and she _hates_ it, hates how long they take to heal and the constant grind of pain at every breath. But now she has new memories, memories of fighting her own lungs for breath in the back of the Gigahorse, memories of fever and terror as she slipped in and out of consciousness in her first days back at the Citadel. She pushes them away as best she can, along with everything else.

Of course they’d tried to rape her. She’d learned to read impending violence like storm clouds, and she’d felt that particular threat crackling in the air from the minute they’d started searching her. The intelligence about the Citadel was almost incidental; they’d wanted to hurt and take and put her in her place. Of course they had. Just because the Citadel was different now didn’t mean the rest of the Wasteland was. Stupid to have ever thought she could let her guard down about that.

Her first thought had been, _Let them fucking try._

She keeps replaying things in her mind and every decision seems logical given the available choices. They were unsophisticated, easy to provoke into a fight where they were guaranteed to underestimate her. Of course throwing their own threats back in their faces was what had done it.

She’d been protecting Max. That’s what she had told herself, anyway. But in a tiny dark corner of her brain she wonders if she hadn’t wanted to _make_ them try. To prove something, to herself or them. To short-circuit the threat on her own terms, like detonating bomb you couldn’t figure out how to defuse. Or just because she wanted the white-hot fury that seared away fear and made killing easy.

She downshifts as the terrain changes from hard-packed dirt to softer sand. Her ribs grind. Her jaw aches where they hit her hard enough to knock out a tooth, and there’s a sick pulse of a headache behind her eyes. She doesn’t think she’s concussed; she’s not nauseous and she remembers everything clearly—far too clearly—but the pain in her head thuds with every heartbeat.

In the back, the dark-skinned girl is staring at her. The blonde one is curled up in a ball, her face tucked away, and Furiosa can’t tell if her stillness is sleep or shock.

“You _are_ her,” the girl says. “The God-killer. Thought you were a myth.”

In the thousand-odd days since the road war, legends have rippled out across the Wasteland. She supposes they are useful if they make her enemies fear her.

“No one I’ve ever killed was a god,” Furiosa says.

 

She tries to keep driving, she really does. But the terrain in this part of the Wasteland is constantly shifting, from gritty wind-scoured flats to drifting sand that has her crawling along in first, to rocky scrub that jolts the Interceptor’s suspension and her aching ribs.

By late morning every gear shift makes her vision double and she reluctantly stops the car and touches Max on the shoulder. Mercifully, he wakes with only a sharp startle and not a swinging fist.

“Can you…?”

He’s only slept a few hours, but he takes one look at her and nods, sliding over into the driver’s seat with gritted teeth while she gets out and walks around to the passenger side. She tries to bend her torso as little as possible when climbing in, but it still sends an agonizing flare across her ribs. She closes her eyes and takes shallow breaths through her nose until the dizziness wanes.

The car rumbles into motion again.

 

She’s back in the Vault, in the Breeding Room at the top of the stairs, and she’s alone but she knows he’s coming just as surely as she knows her own name. She should run, hide, find something to fight with, but she can’t move, she can’t even turn so her back is not facing the door; she is frozen in place and she knows he’s coming, he will be here any minute, but she still can’t fucking _move_ —

She jerks awake, a gasp of pain at the stab in her ribs escaping her before she can stifle it.

It’s late afternoon, by the position of the sun. She doesn’t remember falling asleep.

“Hey.” Max’s gaze flicks over to her in between scanning the horizon. His left eye is swollen halfway shut. “‘S okay.” She has a sharp moment of déjà vu: their positions reversed, her rig instead of his. She nods, trying to breathe normally through the fire in her ribs and still her hammering heart.

Furiosa’s nightmares come in many flavors. They are less frequent now, but far from gone. It’s been a while, though, since she’s had one of the paralyzing Vault dreams that used to wrack her every night.

Fucking hell.

Her head is pounding, every heartbeat thudding in her aching jaw and swollen lip. She takes a couple swallows from her canteen. Closes her eyes and tries to concentrate on making her breathing steady.

After a minute she feels Max’s hand reach out and find hers.

 

She convinces Max to let her take a watch shift that night, balanced against the wheel with all their most obvious weapons stowed in a bag between their bodies, which means she’s awake to hear the women whispering in the car.

“They’re going to hurt us.” It’s the first thing she’s heard the blonde one, Vale, say since she laid eyes on them.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why else would they take us?”

“Ssh. They might be awake.”

They were both silent and wary, compliant in a shut-down way that reminded her too much of things she’d rather forget. But they hadn’t tried to steal the car, which was a hopeful sign for their level of trust. They wouldn’t have gotten very far, even if they’d somehow managed to peel away before either she or Max could react—she’d convinced Max to put killswitches in—but with Max’s knee she would have been the one running after them, and she doesn’t relish the thought.

Inside the car, there’s a soft rustle of cloth and she hears Magda whisper, “Here. Look.”

“Where did you get that?”

“Swiped it from the kitchen stuff. Was hoping to save it for Mickey’s schlanger, but…”

Vale giggles, a high, childlike noise quickly stifled behind a hand.

“Think you can you sleep now?” Magda asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Try for a little while. I’ll stay awake.”

Furiosa supposes she should be worried, but she’s surrounded by twelve guns. And if the woman needs a knife to feel safe in the car, well, she can relate.

 

“Magda has a knife,” Furiosa mutters when the women go off to piss behind a pile of rocks in the morning. “Waistband of her pants.” Now that she knew to look she’d caught the outline of it when Magda climbed out of the car. “Just so you know.”

Max is relieving himself by the car’s front tire, carefully aiming away from the vehicle itself and favoring his bad leg heavily. She’s keenly aware that he hasn’t walked more than a handful of steps since they drove away from the city. She doesn’t know if he really can’t, or if he’s saving them in case he needs them.

“Mm. Smart girl,” he says.

 

Capable stifles a gasp when Furiosa winces her way out of the car in the Citadel’s garage. The bit of her face she bothered to look at in the rearview mirror is livid purple, and she’s sure the rest of her doesn’t look any better. At least the bright red rope marks above her elbows have faded, staving off the need for too specific a story.

“Damn,” Toast drawls. “What do the other guys look like?”

“Dead,” Furiosa says, hoping her tone will forestall further discussion.

Ace is there too, giving her an appraising look as she slings her rifle over her shoulder with gritted teeth. “I’m fine,” she mutters in response to the quick scan of his gaze over her injuries. He’s seen her hurt more than anyone here, and he knows what she can take. “Help me with Max.”

Max is out of the car, but leaning heavily on the doorframe. She doesn’t wait for him to lie about his ability to walk, just ducks under his arm on her less-injured side while Ace supports him from the other one.

“Up to the bath, straightaway.” When had Janey gotten there? There’s a circle of War Boys clustered around them. It’s entirely too many people and Furiosa doesn’t want to answer questions. “Clean first, then we’ll patch you up.”

“Brought friends. In the back.” Furiosa nods to the car, but Capable is already at the window, trying to coax the women out.

“Let’s get them washed, too,” Janey says to Capable over her shoulder. “Milk Mothers’ baths. Don’t recycle the water; throw it out somewhere no one will drink it.”

Max is silent, but she can see the clench of his jaw as she and Ace help him limp heavily toward the tunnel out of the garage, Janey trailing behind them. Every breath is a stab in her ribs.

“Look like shit, Boss,” Ace mutters when they’re out of earshot of the crowd in the garage.

“I’ll live,” she grits out.

“That weren’t never in doubt.”

Max makes a short wheezing noise that might be a laugh.

 

By the time they make it up to the Imperators’ bath, Max is pale and covered with sweat. Ace leaves as soon as they ease him down on the bench, but Janey stays, bolting the door behind her while Furiosa fumbles off her arm and loosens the leather underneath with gritted teeth.

The cities are poison, littered with the lethal remains of Before-time weapons. It was one of the first lessons they learned as children: how to identify a cluster bomblet, which looked like a stray bit of scrap until it blew your leg off, or a clump of white phosphorous, harmless until exposed to air, mistaken for a chunk of plastic until it burned through your skin right down to the bone. There weren’t so many of these things near the Green Place, but enough that they needed to know as soon as they were old enough to run around unsupervised.

Even the cities that hadn’t been nuked are blanketed with the toxic dust left by the shells that could punch through concrete, bombs made from the remains of other bombs. They can’t help what they breathe in, but they can at least keep it from lingering on their skin or being spread to others through the water.

She doesn’t know how long the women had been living in the city. They’d been with the scav pack long enough for babies to be born, from what Magda had said. Furiosa hadn’t asked how many had been born whole.

She needs help peeling off her blood-spattered top. Janey steps in before she has to ask, clicking her tongue at the rainbow of bruises on her skin. There’s a blotch of violent purple centered over where her ribs hurt the most.

There are finger-shaped bruises on both her thighs just above the knee, the intent behind them unmistakable. She’s glad Capable hadn’t followed them in; there would have been questions and declarations of sympathy she doesn’t want. Janey’s brusque commentary-free caretaking is a blessed relief.

“You too, strip off,” Janey says to Max with a matter-of-fact wave of her hand. “Nothing I ain’t seen before.” He puffs out a breath of annoyance, but shrugs out of his jacket and shirt.

When he finally slides his pants down, his knee is a solid mass of blue and purple bruising, swelling puffed up under his skin around the edges of where she’d tied her scarf tight.

Without really meaning to, Furiosa sits on the bench and leans her shoulder against his, feels him press back against her a little. Janey is inspecting his knee, moving his leg a little while he grits his teeth, the twisted knot of scar tissue puckering slightly as the joint moves.

“How much does it hurt?” Janey asks.

“Plenty,” Max huffs out.

“Gimme a number, boyo.” Of all the things to survive the fall of the world, this way of measuring pain seems worthy.

“Seven,” he says, which to anyone else would be an eight. Max always expects there to be worse pain coming.

“What does he need?” Furiosa asks.

“Needs a new knee. Not many of those still around.” Janey shakes her head. “Rest it for now. I’ll make a poultice that’ll bring the swelling down, then we’ll see where we are.”

Max grunts noncommittally, seeming unsurprised by the prognosis.

Janey bundles all their clothes into a blanket, to be washed separately from everything else. Max makes a grab for his jacket. Janey utters an exasperated, “You’ll get it back, don’t worry,” before he mutters, “Salvage.”

In the midst of the violence and its aftermath, Furiosa had almost forgotten the purpose of their trip. But of course Max always had his eye on the salvage.

He extracts a wrapped bundle with the precious spoils of their trip: a steel syringe-like device, an unopened pack of filter needles, a box of twelve glass ampoules, miraculously unbroken, and a metal tin filled with small plastic cards with patterns of colored squares on them. They mean nothing to Furiosa, but Janey gasps as if he’s delivered the world’s last remaining handful of coffee beans.

“Radiation detection badges.” Janey holds up one of the cards reverently. “Holy Mothers, not even exposed.”

“Lead box.” Max taps the metal tin. “Dead useful in its own right.”

“Thank you.” Janey smiles, gathering up the salvage and their clothes for cleaning. “Wash up, now. I’ll be back with some clean clothes.”

They wash under the showers, standing in basins to catch the contaminated water. She scrubs away dried blood and tries to let the feeling of cool, clean water on her skin be the only thing she thinks about.

 

It’s only early evening, but Janey steers them both into Furiosa’s bed, a neat dressing wrapping the poultice around Max’s knee and a pile of pillows stacked up for Furiosa to sleep half-sitting up.

She accepts the food Janey offers but adamantly refuses the sleeping tea. It doesn’t kill the nightmares, just makes it harder to claw her way out of them.

She waits until Janey’s footsteps fade before she gets to her feet with a grimace and bolts the door. She has no illusions of a peaceful sleep tonight, but she’ll never be able to close her eyes with it open.

When she eases back into the bed Max puts an arm around her. She wants to rest her head on his shoulder, but a sideways bend of her ribs is out of the question.

His fingers brush over the bruises on her thighs. “‘M fine,” she mutters. Her ribs hurt, her jaw hurts, and she’s exhausted but so jittery she can’t imagine sleeping any time soon. She makes herself close her eyes anyway.

 

She’s on the bed in the Breeding Room, her face pressed down into sheets that stink of him, a crushing weight on top of her that doesn’t move no matter how hard she fights—

She’s on the floor of the Vault, the black trousers of two Imperators towering over her, awaiting punishment for some infraction she can’t remember—

She’s on the cold floor by the edge of the pool, and someone is holding her head under the water, drowning her like a fetus born deformed or female, her lungs burning for air, and she can’t breathe, she can’t breathe—

She wakes up gasping in the dark room, every synapse lit up with panic. The stone chamber is suddenly airless, the rock walls ready to tumble in and crush her, and someone’s hands are on her shoulders but she twists away before they can pull her back under—

Cool night air is filling her lungs. She’s outside and she can’t remember getting there. Max’s arm is around her waist, pulling her against his chest, his body warm through the thin shirt he’s wearing. She becomes dimly aware that the high gasping whistle she keeps hearing is her own breathing.

“Easy, easy. You’re okay.” His other hand is on her shoulder, easing her back against him. “Breathe here. Where my hand is.” His palm is warm against the spot below her solar plexus. Breathing that deep seems fucking impossible through the band of fire around her ribs.

“Can’t,” she rasps out.

“Yes you can.” His voice is low and steady, the rumble of an engine against her back. She pushes breath down into her stomach even though it sends a white-hot lance through her ribs, her lungs spasming on the exhale. “There you go. Again,” he says, and she somehow does it. The pain is so sharp she whimpers involuntarily.

“I know, I know.” His free hand kneads at the back of her neck, one of the few parts of her that doesn’t hurt, a steady, grounding pressure. Another wheezing exhale judders out of her.

She doesn’t know how many times she pushes air into her lungs against the dizzying stab of pain in her side. At some point, other sensations start trickling in through the white wall of panic. She’s in the garden at the top of the tower, sitting on the hard ground by the entrance tunnel, her limbs numb and buzzy and _cold_. As soon as she registers the cold she’s shaking, and he pulls a blanket over her, and it’s only then that it hits her—

“Oh, fuck, Max, you can’t _walk_ —”

“ _Can_ walk,” he grumbles. “You went. I followed.”

Shame rises like acid in her belly. She’d been stumbling around blind with terror, and he’d gone after her with a bum leg and still had enough foresight to bring a blanket.

She realizes they’re sitting by the rock wall at the entrance to the gardens and wonders if she’d collapsed there, or if that was only as far as he could make it.

“I’m sorry.” She wants to curl up in a ball, but her ribs won’t allow it. She settles for tucking herself sideways against his chest, her forehead against his neck, and then his arms are wrapping around her, solid and warm while still being mindful of her many wounds.

“Mm. Don’t be sorry.” He rests his cheek against the top of her head.

She’s still shaking, but it’s not from cold. It’s been years— _years_ —since panic swallowed her up that completely, so intense she couldn’t think straight or remember things. She is twitchy and strung out and so, so _angry;_ angry at them, for demolishing all the work she’d done, taking her body back from fear, and angry at herself, that she could tear down a whole regime with her bare hands and still be undone by a pack of smegs in a basement.

She’d killed them, just as surely as she’d killed every other man who’d tried to fuck her without her consent, but it didn’t _matter,_ they’d still gotten inside her.

She curls her hand into a fist and grinds it against Max’s chest, because that’s the surface that’s in front of her. If she’s hurting him, he doesn’t let it show.

The cities are poison. The world is poison, and she feels like she’s tracked it back into the one place that was safe, dug it up like a lump of chemical fire that should have lain undisturbed.

It isn’t just them, she knows that; it’s thousands of days of pain threatening to crack open and swallow her whole. She’d shoved so much down out of sight, welded the hatches shut and kept moving, because sometimes even looking back was enough to shatter you.

Some things needed to stay buried. All they did when you brought them to the surface was burn right through you.

Max is stroking a soothing hand along her shortened arm, over and over, not really trying to do anything but give her a sensation to focus on outside of her hammering heart and reeling brain.

It does help a little, when she remembers to pay attention to it. He’s good at this, knowing how to soothe, how to calm panic and help her back to herself and even cool the rage that seems to flare out of nowhere sometimes.

He never asks her to talk. It’s one of his most comforting qualities.

It occurs to her that he knows all this because he’s had to learn it for himself. Suddenly the mental image strikes her, of Max alone in the desert, rocking himself through a panic attack because there was no one else to do it, and it’s unbearably sad.

The twist of her body makes her ribs grind, but she reaches up and wraps her arms around his neck, twining her fingers into his hair and tucking his swollen face carefully into the hollow of her throat. His arms just settle into a new position around her, the stroking hand on her back now, as if he wouldn’t mind holding her forever. She doesn’t think she’d mind either.

 

She doesn’t know how much time has passed when she mutters, “Should go inside.” She has no sense of how long they’ve been out here, but it’s getting colder and if she’s stiff and aching, he must be too.

Going down the stairs takes a long time, as much of his weight on her shoulders as she can bear, taking every step down with his good leg to keep his knee from buckling.

When they’re back in her room, in bed behind the bolted door, he pulls her back into his arms, sitting between his legs like they had been in the garden. He’s not as soft as leaning against the pile of pillows, but he’s far more comforting.

“I might have more nightmares.” She can’t promise that his arms around her won’t become Joe’s, or a slaver’s pulling her away from her mother, or an Imperator dragging her back from a failed escape attempt.

“I know,” Max says.

“You have enough bruises as it is.”

“Acceptable risk,” he mumbles against her shoulder, and why is _that_ the thing that has her breath hitching with sudden tears?

“Hey.” His hand strokes over the fuzz of her hair, and his lips press against her temple, and she’s squeezing her eyes shut and telling herself it’s solely because crying makes her ribs and her jaw and her swollen lip ache.

She breathes deep as if his hand is on her stomach again and fights the tears back into place. “I’m such a mess.” She doesn’t mean to say it, but it slips out raw and jagged anyway.

“Mm.” He doesn’t contradict her, and that’s reassuring somehow. “Still moving, though.” His thumb swipes a disobedient tear off her cheek. “Go to sleep,” he says, twining his fingers through hers. “I’ll be here.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com/)!


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